In Situ/Web Visualization of CFD Data Using OpenFOAM

Project reference: 1809

Visualization of cavitation is currently a very interesting topic. In the project, results from previous HPC simulations will be provided as a base to develop a visualization strategy based on advanced open-source tools.

Starting from an already developed In Situ visualization interface for OpenFoam, we propose to also develop a web 3D visualization tool that can be used online to check the correctness of the simulations but that may also be adopted offline (i.e. for post-processing) to explore the time evolution of the 3D fields of the model.

Such tool will be designed and implemented to be portable to other coupled modelling systems.

Project Mentor: Prof. Federico Piscaglia

Site Co-ordinator: Simone Bnà

Learning Outcomes:
Increase student’s skills about:

• PARAVIEW (Catalyst, ParaviewWeb)
• OpenFOAM
• PYTHON
• C++
• MPI
• Managing resources on Tier-0 and Tier-1 systems
• Batch scheduler (PBS)
• Remote visualization
• Batch visualization of scientific data (ParaViewCINEMA)
• Video and 3D editing (Blender)

Student Prerequisites (compulsory):
Knowledge of:

• OpenFOAM (basic)
• Python : strong
• ParaView : good
• C++: good (Fortran is better)
• Linux/Unix: strong

Student Prerequisites (desirable):
Knowledge of:

• MPI
• Blender

Training Materials:
None

Workplan:

• Week 1: Common Training session
• Week 2: Introduction to CINECA systems, small tutorials on parallel visualization and detailed work planning.
• Week 3: Problem analysis and deliver final Workplan at the end of week.
• Week 4, 5: Production phase (A proper visualization workflow will be implemented starting from existing outputs).
• Week 6, 7: Final stage of production phase (Depending on the results and timeframe, the visualization scripts will be adapted to the production workflow). Preparation of the final movie.
• Week 8: Completing the final movie. Write the final Report.

Final Product Description:
The purpose of this project is to integrate a visualization tool within the OpenFOAM combustion model workflow. Our final product will consist of a visualization web interface based on ParaView Web as well as a movie illustrating the use and the results obtained during this 2 months work period. In addition, a small report on the work done will be produced.

Adapting the Project: Increasing the Difficulty:
If we will have enough time we could expand the project into two directions:

• Use the batch workflow of ParaView (ParaView CINEMA) to pre-compute all relevant visualization artefacts during simulation phase
• We can also create several visualization pipelines for analysis purposes.

Adapting the Project: Decreasing the Difficulty

• A simple web interface to Paraview will be developed, and put in production.
• A very simple movie showing the web interface will be prepared.

Resources:
The software OpenFOAM, released by the OpenFOAM Foundation and by OpenCFD will be provided togeher with all the open-source software neeed for the work (e.g. ParaView and Blender). The software is already available on the CINECA clusters that will be used by the students with their own provided accounts.

Organisation:
CINECA